Sometimes it feels like I sleep standing on all fours in a stable. Captured and whipped. Tamed and tired.
My mom told my father that her body was “too weak” to have an abortion in the Soviet system of no anesthetics and unsanitary, conveyer-belt-like conditions, and so he reluctantly agreed to let her keep me.
One of the first things I remember Luda teaching me is that we were both born in the Year of the Horse. She told me about the four elements and how they cycle through every twelve years in the Chinese calendar. Luda is a Fire Horse. I am an Earth Horse. Luda felt the damp spirit of my mother making my dirt darker and heavier, no matter how much she tried to warm me up with her light.
A foal that can’t get up on all fours before the amniotic fluid dries on her fur is considered too sickly to stay alive. There is usually a heat lamp in the stable to help the babe find her way to the dam. To establish a bond, a wild horse marks the foal with her scent while licking her clean but follows the urge to gallop away with the herd if the little one has been touched by another mare, or is unhealthy.
I always thought that the word meaning baby horse was pronounced like the word foul—gross and smelly—but it’s somewhere between the word full and the word fall.
Wholeness. Then void. Found. Then lost.
Say the word foal out loud.
VIII
It is hard to organize our days together in my congealed 1980s Soviet Union mind. The casualness of violence. The nearness of peril or harm like a dull click of an abacus. The decade is a bronze disease patina, the green paste, on a doorbell that rings when you show up, and you do not show up very often. When you do appear, the flipbook banalities marry the destruction in a figure eight of a skater tracing the ice in reverse at a reckless speed.
You sit in the bath facing me, not yet in your thirties. Your breasts used to be my breasts, belonged to me, would get too full and ache without me. Later, much later, when they have fed two mouths that have rarely spoken your name, mine look like what I once inhaled of a wandering mother—your dark blue veins, wet worms on cracked white tile. Like you, my body would become a lopsided provider, the muteness of the right breast forcing the left side to overfunction, to nearly explode with nurturing, with twice the volume. A drought and drown chest.
You tell me about your see-through skin, your thin-skinness. “Have you seen the paintings of noble ladies in the Hermitage?” you wonder aloud. If I look closely, their corseted, plump, and powdered bosoms have the same trolley rail lines that refuse to hide beneath the first light coating of Leningrad snow as your chest does. My father took me to museums, ballets, and operas almost every weekend, so you were asking a concrete, pointed question. Even though your family had lived in the most culturally rich city in Russia for generations, you never went to the Hermitage with your daughter—too much of a townie to act like a tourist on your native soil.
You stand up, a floating iceberg in the fog followed by your little girl’s steam, and begin to dry off. Our ancestors come from good stock, you remind me. My breasts will surely turn out fine and delicate like yours. My blood will suck up the lost riches and formal tea times you imagine your ghosts once had and make a map on my body as well, unable to hide our true-blue ties.
We are in the four-by-four pea soup–green room with a toilet and torn-up newspapers at your feet that we wipe ourselves with when the tissue paper runs out. The smudged traces of the truth in the news. The smearing. The tainting of the facts. Flushed evidence.
It’s my turn to go and you hoist me up onto the cold porcelain and read from the scraps you move around with your big toe, smoking a cigarette. I’m constipated, and you give me a puff of your smoke because it always helps you go. This trick works. I cough and open up and feel relief.
All of my holes feel different after this.
× × × ×
You argue with my dad over whether you are drunk again or not. He calls you a liar and you snap like hollow timber. My fingers squeeze the unvarnished wood of my toddler bed. I hear your ribs break as I press my face against the crib slats, which now shake like telephone wires in a hailstorm.
× × × ×
I watch you burn my milk, your face greasing the kitchen linoleum, robe over the waist, empty baby bottle in hand, brown rubber nipple still on the counter. I paw and knead your body like a blind kitten. The screams get our neighbor, Elizabeta Mikhailovna, to come out of her room in our communal flat and lead me away from the kitchen to watch her little black-and-white TV and suck on hot tea–soaked sugar cubes.
× × × ×
You wake me up in the middle of the night, probably drunk but happy, and insist we go out picking flowers. You get me dressed and we enter the warm, dusky light. The city is silent. We prowl the parks with the best landscaping, the ones with statues of a cast-iron Peter the Great mounting a horse or a granite Lenin bust squinting thoughtfully. We pluck branches and blooms as though harvesting our own private garden. I fall asleep blanketed in sweet pollen and petals. When I wake up, every surface of the room holds a container with lilacs, tulips, and hyacinths spilling out like bowing servants. You draped over your gaps and absences in this stolen beauty.
× × × ×
You have a few friends over. They say that they are in love and their teeth are wet and huge as they speak into each other’s foreheads. You hug them tight and announce that you could marry them right now. You stumble over to the kitchen and get two dry green peas and sit in front of the couple you placed on the edge of your bed with wineglasses in their hands. “Let your love grow for each other like these peas sprouting in your bellies,” you say, kneeling down in front of them, looking up into their red faces with now-heavy eyelids. You cross yourself and plop the peas into the liquor they take down with one gulp. I clap, and you look awake again.
I learn about filling a vessel in the dark—to not disturb your high with the turn of a light switch. Listen for the sound approaching the top. You will know when. You will know full if you fill enough cups in the dark. In your cups, girl.
Fun. Fun with problems. Problems. The mother of all problems. Mother problems are inherent multipliers. Your party-girl fissures reveal the hot lava spilling over as it burns captivated onlookers alive—mummifies, envelopes, seals up their every opening.
× × × ×
You are asleep on your side. An hour ago, it was dark in this room. Now all of the men you brought over have left. Thirty minutes ago, there was light. Granny Galina bravely chased them out of her bedroom. The one guy who was passed out in the chair with his flaccid dick sticking out of his pants was slow to move. Two hours ago, he told me it was a lollipop and I should taste it. He tried to grab my head after I flipped the light switch on to check up on you, but I ducked past him and wriggled out. The other two men cradling you from each side act like they don’t see me. I step over spread-out legs, like blackberry brambles curled up in a ditch, and go call your mother on the hallway telephone. The other numbers I know to dial are 02 for the police, 03 for the ambulance, and 04 for the gas service.
When the lights are on for the last time the moaning stops and Granny gets to work, expertly escorting out the naked assembly, much too calmly for my taste. Her elbow moves up and down in an effort to scrub your period blood off her shiny sky-blue comforter once it’s just us girls again. She mumbles about you “ruining her nice things” and gently pushes you over to get at more of the hot-pink stain. I turn out the lights. I am never left alone with you on purpose after this night.
IX
Each time I hold two of the most popular books written by French women, coincidentally about sex, masochism, sadism, and seeking oblivion, I instinctively imagine every turn of the page as a blanket for my mother’s body, so riddled with shame. Story of O and The Sexual Life of Catherine M. are about giving power away and asserting power, but both through being taken, used, pounded, trashed, worshiped, entered. O dies. M lives.
The fact that the universal hole of O and the double-house schema of M, re
presenting Mother, are conjoined here doesn’t surprise me. I have seen the MOM in my SOS when calling for you. You are gaping, open wide, closed, and remote, all at once.
The movie made from the Pauline Réage book about O, forced to live in a castle where she is whipped and used by men in order to become a more loyal and devoted lover to her man, was a favorite bootlegged VHS tape procured by my father. Much like with M, O was about loss of control, curiosity, freedom, and numbers. Above all, volume. There was to be structure and order within the chaos—the first rule of proper mothering.
Pauline Réage is a name of the pen. Anne Cécile Desclos had a couple pseudonyms for publishing her love letters to seduce Jean Paulhan. Her object of desire even writes her a preface, entitled “Happiness in Slavery,” purporting he has no clue who is the real author of the Story of O.
Some women aren’t to be canonized, publicly accepted, or even acknowledged. My biggest fear as the missing daughter of an unseen and unheard mother pointed to the looming victim legacy as mine to surgically remove and dissect. Because everything started as a copy.
Catherine Millet only abbreviates her name in the title but carries no shame, no need for an empathetic relationship with her audience, no interest in being absorbed, revered, and mostly, no interest in being dominated—just penetrated. Millet is an unmother.
Some women’s insides cannot betray their outsides even though the art they made was splendid, certainly more deserving of the attention Henry Miller basked in while he took Anaïs Nin’s money. As every library became my foster home and every book a coded path to grappling with the absent woman who never actually raised me, just haunted me, a book like Henry and June roasted my throat with the fear that tough and smart doesn’t protect you from subservient and used up.
I knew that Anaïs Nin was hot for Henry Miller and kept a journal about their trysts. Henry would say stuff like: “You drive me crazy with passion” and “Come here at once, it will be beautiful, I promise.” Men like that—hungry, casually greedy, always landing on their feet while uttering the most clichéd things—were all around me. I hated that the woman I admired gave in to a bad romance, but since Anaïs was the closest comparison to both damaged and regal I could find, she was therefore the embodiment of Elena on a pedestal and in the gutter of my imagination.
I became very old once I saw those men having sex with her limp body. I became her mother and she my baby. Now, shaken, we were both crushed-ice girls, all mixed up. I would have to learn about Elena by reading an instructional manual that didn’t exist. There were no chapters in novels or essays in anthologies that could teach me to keep loving Elena through witnessing what seemed like rape, but could have been a choreographed orgy, or even sex work. A choice, not choice.
So, I read about how Henry Miller entered Anaïs without needing any Vaseline, the way she did with her husband, and how her pussy was constantly wet for him. She was very busy mopping the slippery floors from their heat, and putting together little pastry trays for Henry to sustain him through inebriated writing sessions. She could have just made a weekly appointment with a dominatrix after her big business meetings, like the powerful men who control things in the big bad world would do. I guess you can’t pay some guys to beat women when they’ll do it for free.
Anaïs was supreme at her craft but was labeled a lying, neurotic, erotic diarist, which is something like being called a supercreative cleaning lady, if you ask me.
She was stapling her ripped-open knees to kitchen floors, waiting for her top-shelf treat, because hers and Henry’s passion was worth being cut down to size, where she was already small, in the SOS parts below, where her dad used to give her the most attention.
Henry Miller is a fantastic professional loser, a foreshadowing of male slacker culture. Using your gorgeous young wife for inspiration is great genius to be sure. June was moving his pen with her damn cunt. I wish I were kidding, but it’s just not that funny. I think she might have been distracted, like, the entire time. Even her muse of a cunt couldn’t get his horny verse to compost, because Anaïs was stealing away all the heat and melting the Vaseline inside until the lines blurred.
Unlike June, Anaïs didn’t actually need him, because she had all the money from her genial husband and was not gonna die on the side of the road when they were done mating like dogs. Anaïs died in luxury as more than just Henry Miller’s fuck-buddy-pen-pal-cruisin’-for-a-bruisin’ and that is a legacy all its own. Certainly a brighter ending than my mother’s, once her husband found a younger woman and, later, a ticket to crawl out from beneath the Iron Curtain without a goodbye.
X
In Soviet times, Russian babies were bound in tight swaddles for the first four months of their helpless existence. The hospitals, understaffed and lacking in medical equipment, relied on ancient methods of soothing. The babies in a maternity ward were placed against a wall in their cocoons and were not tended to until they became irate or the schedule allowed for it.
Bondage is believed by some scientists to reduce anxiety. Submissives refer to this bliss of restraint, this freedom of captivity, as “rope space.”
Once pregnant, a woman faces four outcomes. Abortion. Miscarriage. Live delivery. Stillborn delivery.
Everything after that is a process of adding or subtracting to reach zero. You are not asked, but told, to give in.
And then if you are not feeding, you are bleeding.
× × × ×
Hall of Fame. Hall of Shame. That’s motherhood—from the maternity ward, where a sweet and patient nurse forces you to walk and to pee on your own, then helps put on your stretchy hospital underwear and pad, to the passing fanfare back home where the phone stops ringing, replacing questions about your day with screams and vomit. The violent shaking and puking in the transition stage of labor will cycle through your post-birth world with no hair-of-the-dog cures to relieve you. Physical autonomy and libidinal discharge live apart now, marooned on distant shores.
Why can’t it be both ways? Why do mothers have to be forgotten or brave, like soldiers? Why must the telling be the sensational center, and not the sentence, not the craft, not the gestation of words?
I get to feel truly lonely, but never alone, when I become a mother for the first time, a month before my thirtieth birthday. Maybe that’s the whole point of conception. When offered only commas and ellipses you will bust your tail to find a period; a full stop. Then the train never comes, and you wonder how to get home. You went to your old train stop like a fool and it is now permanently under construction.
One day, long before she gives birth, a girl might reach down in the shower after fourth period to find that she is a woman and zombie walk to all the frightened girls in her gym class and scream out that she is dying. She must be dying. They will close their eyes, push, spit, and shout, like at a sold-out concert. They will throw giant pads at her as she tries to hug their repulsed, stiff bodies, their clean cotton shirts smelling of name-brand detergent and mothers who mop their white kitchen tiles every day and teach them to wash down there just as seamlessly as their own mothers once did.
Carrie’s mother knew where the tragedy began, the SOS of her daughter. I have almost given up hope that I might acquire cunt telekinesis one of these days. So, I remain a faithful ballbuster instead.
× × × ×
When I was little I spent nights thinking about choice as though I were a witch. What would I choose if I had to pick from a set of things? I chose by looking at the see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil monkey figurine my father kept on his desk along with a paperweight of the Romulus and Remus twins suckling a she-wolf. I thought that you have to know, even if there is no choice, which would you rather be? Are you afraid of the dark, child? Are you in love with music, girl? Are you trying to tell me something, baby? I tossed these around and, too often fearing the loss of eyesight and hearing, always caught the mute ball.
If God had stricken me with one of these at birth, or if there were a war and I had the cho
ice between a bomb going off near my house, the explosion rupturing my eardrums, or the shrapnel going in my eyes, I wished for neither. I would then have to get tortured, my tongue cut off by the enemy soldiers who invaded Russia in my recurring fear during the Cold War. I was relieved to think I would become permanently inarticulate and never tell stories I was not allowed to tell anyway, because the woman of risk and suffocating candor who made this mouth was always unspeakable.
I think that the see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil monkey needs a fourth set of arms to cover her crotch.
When I was about eight my mother gave me an unsolicited sex talk. As she dried off after a bath I asked her whether I would grow a mound of pubic hair like hers. I was a child with much fuzz in embarrassing places, like the nape of my neck, lower back, and to my horror, my vagina. Soon I would be nothing but fur, like her wild fur, but worse. She tilted her head sideways and asked me if I knew that she took my father’s virginity. She made a cup out of her hand, as though scooping water from an invisible fountain. It was my father’s long-gone balls she was miming for me; a terrifying performance. She was once a powerful teacher and held court over his young body before she was escorted stage right with divorce-paper confetti in the air. My eventual stepmother was handed the broom so no trace of her ticker-tape parade out of our lives would remain.
XI
Leningrad is made up of more than forty islands on the delta of the river Neva. It has a rainy maritime climate in fall and spring. The river freezes over completely in the winter, connecting the islands below as they are by the bridges above. In the summer it is a musky, humid swamp. Between all the rain, the snow, the fog, the freezes, and the thaws, the city, which has one of the greatest art collections in the world, is constantly fighting off the erosion of such pervasive dampness.
Mother Winter Page 3